Journalism Competition and Preservation Act & Search Engines

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Hey, so Devin, I've got a quick one here today. It actually falls under the category of things to keep your eye on. So no action required immediately, but something to keep in mind. It's a bill before the Senate that's called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. It's Senate Bill 673 in the U.S. Senate. It was sponsored by Amy Klobuchar. Basically what it's doing is creating a model for monetizing or providing money to publishers of content that is taken by search engines, people like Google or other search engines, and maybe even some of the big platforms like Facebook. They aggregate news and they basically just scrape news from smaller news sites and put it up as their own. And then because they have a lot of great content, they monetize it through advertising, what this would do is allow the owners of those smaller websites to negotiate to be paid for the use of their copyrighted material, which is currently being used for free. They would get paid for it instead. That would have a bit of an interesting effect on the monetization of this kind of content that the search engines right now are getting for free. What do you think about that?

Yeah, it's super interesting because this is actually a problem that I think has been created out of some of the privacy changes that have taken place, but also platforms getting really hungry to just keep users engaged and on the platforms longer. Because when you think about it, every time somebody goes to potentially find an answer within a Google search result, if they get the answer they want, their session's over, right? If I'm just online looking for a recipe on how to make this type of meal, I'm going to do my search, I'm going to look, I'm going to find the recipe that appeals to me or the one that I was looking for. I'm gonna click on it, I'm gonna see my recipe and probably 10 gazillion ads and a mile-long explanation about why this person's life is so amazing and why you need to cook this type of food, why it's healthy, blah, blah, blah, all that crap. And then you get to the recipe. But at that point, I'm not searching anymore. And the benefit of being able to take results and put them into the search engine makes it so you stay within that search engine page. And you do not have to go anywhere else to get it. You get rid of that ad experience from being on that awful recipe website. It's just a win-win for everybody. And the likelihood is that I would end up potentially searching for more, or I didn't see the right recipe the first time, so I might search again, etc., which is more ad revenue for Google. When you think about other platforms, even like LinkedIn or Facebook, their entire mantra in life has been keep people scrolling on the platform as long as humanly possible, because the more they scroll, the more ad dollars we get. And I think that's becoming abundantly clear. That's where platforms are heading. Any platform that makes their revenue off from advertising dollars, 9 times out of 10, that's probably their strategy. And believe it or not, even a monster like Google is not shy to doing things to try and keep people on their platforms longer either. This is definitely not a surprise from my perspective. I am interested to see what this evolves to purely from the perspective that they're obviously singling out Google or even just search engines specifically in this. I would say all platforms that are driven that are driven by ad revenue are probably guilty of this in some respect. And even scarier is some of the data around teenage girls' health as it relates to being on TikTok and Instagram for long periods of time. Suicide rates going up with that. Like, there's a lot scarier stuff that I'm frankly surprised the government hasn't intervened up until this point. But we're going to see a waterfall effect if Google actually were to be struck down or have to pay publishers or something like that. As a result of some type of legislative change, you better believe we're probably going to see some other legislation coming not too far down the pike that's related to other social platforms, time on pages. To my understanding, even companies like Facebook and TikTok hired psychologists to figure out how they can hack the brain to elicit more dopamine to keep people on longer. Not a joke. Yeah, I think there's actually truth in that. And that's a reasonably nefarious tactic to be able to just keep people on a platform longer to make more ad dollars from them. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot coming down the pike. No actionable items, but it's certainly an interesting conceptual topic to keep an eye on.

Yeah. Something to watch. It would probably increase some of the fairness because I think people that create content that's useful for people, like you said, maybe a recipe or something, if that just ends up on the Google search results page and you're trying to get people to your website and Google's keeping them on their website. That's a little, that's nefarious to me. I mean, I understand that Google wants people to only go to your website if they click an ad, but I think part of the price of running a search engine and being useful and having that many eyeballs is that you need to spread the wealth around a little bit. My personal opinion is I'm glad to see this. And like you, I'd like to see some other legislation. I'm not into government overreach, but I also think there needs to be a more level playing field than we've seen lately.

So.

I'm going to keep an eye on this and we'll keep you updated on it going forward.

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